DAVID HARE

DAVID HARE; Schnitzler's Intent

Published: December 6, 1998

To the Editor:

Writing about ''The Blue Room,'' his adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's play ''Reigen,'' David Hare states that ''in 1900 'Reigen' was never intended for public performance'' ['Making Sex in Schnitzler Less Cynical,'' Nov. 22]. Schnitzler, Mr. Hare says, wrote ''his 10 scenes of sexual love -- in which 10 mutually unfaithful partners form an ironic daisy-chain of deceit -- for purely private distribution.''

Certainly Mr. Hare should know that no playwright, amateur or professional, writes a play other than for production. Even plays like ''Peer Gynt'' and ''Faust,'' labeled by their authors as dramatic poems, were performed on stage in their authors' lifetimes. Admittedly, as Mr. Hare writes, ''Schnitzler knew that the scenes he had written were too obscene to be staged.'' But this didn't stop him. Though a private printing was indeed issued, it was more likely by necessity than by choice; in any event, it didn't take him long to get the play into general release.

Here is a full sequence of events:

''Reigen,'' published in 1903 and first produced in 1912, met with considerable censorship problems from the time it was written, 1897-98. Possibly because Schnitzler believed the play was susceptible to misinterpretation, he had 200 copies privately printed in 1900, for distribution to his friends. As copies were passed from one person to another, the play soon became a sensation.

In 1903, Schnitzler permitted a trade edition to be printed, but it was attacked as subversive and obscene. The press refused to review it; a public reading in Vienna was curtailed by the police; Germany confiscated and banned the publication. When an unauthorized production was mounted in Budapest in 1912, it was tastelessly performed and consequently banned by the police. The play caused subsequent riots in Munich and Berlin, occasioned a trial, and was even discussed in the Austrian Parliament. Finally, in 1921, it received its Viennese premiere, causing more demonstrations, including proto-Nazi protests that it was ''Jewish filth.''

Mr. Hare exaggerates when he writes, ''I am sure I was influenced by the knowledge that almost every previous staging of these scenes has been a thoroughgoing flop.'' This may come as news to many producers and directors, at least in the United States, where ''Reigen'' remains one of the most frequently performed of foreign plays; that does not imply, of course, that every one of those productions has been sterling. I say this because my own translation of the work, first published by Macmillan in 1964, has seen more than 150 productions both at home and abroad (and there are other translations out there being performed as well).

CARL R. MUELLER

Los Angeles

The writer, a professor of theater at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a translator of foreign plays.